


Thistle

by Milady



Category: Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:25:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milady/pseuds/Milady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thistle will grow where roses aren't tended</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thistle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ViaLethe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViaLethe/gifts).



Mist rose in wisps off the cold ground, like curled ribbons off the gift of the warming earth. Winter was still holding on to Yorkshire, but the promise of spring was there. The little green things would be growing soon, sprouting out as the mist did now, to decorate the landscape and delight. Delight was not what Colin felt from his window, nor did he see any promise in the bleak dampness. The illusion that spring restored everything was over. It had been over for months, when the ground swallowed something it would never return.  
  
"Colin."  
  
He only shrugged. He knew the voice, knew the reproachful eyes that were upon him. At first, she had been sympathetic. She had felt her own pain when Colin's father died, and in those days she shared in Colin's sadness. Together they visited the graveyard, visited the portrait gallery, visited the past in a hundred pictures scattered across the cold floor. But, little by little, Mary's heart had recovered, and if she wasn't happy, she was at least no longer a slave to grief. When he was generous, Colin believed Mary knew how to survive better because both of her parents had already died. When he was resentful, as he was now, he decided she just didn't understand what it was to lose someone you loved.  
  
"None of this will bring him back, Colin."  
  
"Neither will pretending nothing is wrong. You don't know more about this just because you know more people who have died."  
  
"I know more than you do, because I care to look." Angry, fading footsteps told Colin he was alone. Again.  
  
Mary soon found herself mimicking Colin's position, curled up by the great window in her bedroom to watch the world wake. Her porridge cooled on the table behind her, untouched. She had no room in her stomach for it when her heart was already there, resting like a boulder. Of course she missed her uncle, the poor man, but life was for the living. It would be such a short time, comparatively, that she had to enjoy being alive instead of commiserating with the dead. Without Colin, she felt like this brief life was being wasted. As long as he sacrificed himself to death, she couldn't feel wholly alive.  
  
But how could she tell him that? After seven years of improvement, Colin was now suddenly as bad as he had been at ten, a sour creature without a single thought for anyone else. Her uncle's death had been a blow, a heavy blow, but Mary had thought Colin too strong to be destroyed by just one strike. She had misjudged him, it seemed, or perhaps underestimated him. Colin had always had a way of projecting his miseries on everyone else, even when he hadn't been able to move.  
  
Perhaps it was Mary's turn to move.

* * *

"These," the housekeeper, Mrs. Medlock, announced to the servants, "are to go in the carriage." She gestured to a second cluster of trunks. "These are to follow in the cart. Mind the weight of things before you stack them."  
  
Mary surveyed the trunks assembled in the hall. She had not done much traveling since the voyage from India, and then she had traveled with almost nothing to her name. The pile of belongings reminded her more of the clutter in the hall whenever her uncle had been in transition. He always had great piles of trunks and cases following him across the world. Although Mary was headed only for London, she had at least as many as Lord Craven had ever had, enough to pack away everything she owned.  
  
Beside her, Martha Sowerby was trying to retain her composure. She had never been farther from home than the great house, and now she was going to London! Martha was engaged to a carpenter from the village, but she was staying on with the Cravens until right before the wedding. She hadn't much money to her name, not when her wages had always gone to her mother, and she wanted a little something to start her household with. It would be sore temptation indeed not to spend it all on a fine dress in town.  
  
"What is all this?" The sad footfalls of the young master echoed around his words.  
  
"They're trunks, Colin," Mary said.  
  
"I see that! I mean, what are they doing here?"  
  
"Waiting to be loaded."  
  
Colin demanded, "Whose are they?"  
  
"They're mine, of course." Though she knew she oughtn't, Mary took a sliver of pleasure out of Colin's bewilderment. "I'm going to London for three months."  
  
The shock and sadness on Colin's face was soon clouded with imperious choler. He was ten years-old again, sullen on the outside and screaming on the inside. Even his skin looked suddenly sallow, as if the months of peevishness had at all once decided to appear. The servants who had known Colin as a bedridden child all went back in time with him, shrinking into their skins to avoid being noticed. When Colin finally spoke, it was with chilling, familiar tone. "You aren't going anywhere. I won't allow it."  
  
"I didn't ask for your permission, you thick-skulled pig!" 'Pig' was not a word Mary used lightly, even these many years removed from India. Colin knew this and looked hurt, and Mary wasn't entirely sorry. It felt like the first response she had provoked from him in weeks.  
  
While the cousins shared bitter glances, Mrs. Medlock sent one of her own around the room to the servants. Permission to leave was more often implied than said at Misselthwaite Manor, and it was all too easy for her underlings to overlook the subtle when there were rare fireworks to be seen. She prodded them all with one well-practiced stony glare.   
  
Mary was the first to notice the servants filing out. She had learned to have a little shame in front of them, to think of them as people rather than animals, as she grew. As she watched the last skirts swish through the doorway, she perched herself the edge of a trunk and smiled to herself. It seemed growing had not changed everything; Mary Lennox still had a temper and pride, enough to overcome whatever shame she had borrowed from better souls.    
  
"What are you smiling about?" Colin sneered. "Are you laughing at me?"  
  
"Nobody in this house has smiled for months, Colin. You won't let them."  
  
"We're supposed to be mourning, Mary, not laughing. If people are laughing, then they shouldn't be." Here he paused, catching the breath that was churning out of him in great, crashing waves. Colin saw that Mary wasn't smiling anymore, but something about her still seemed so faithless. She wasn't radiating black the way he was or pulsing with sadness. It made him angry. "And they shouldn't be running off to London, as if everything in the world was just fine!"  
  
"What would you know about people? You haven't cared about anyone since your father died. If you'd not wandered in here, you wouldn't even have known I was gone."  
  
"I don't notice that the sky is still above me. I don't look out the window every morning to make sure the ground hasn't disappeared from under me. The sky will always be above, and the ground will always be below, and I thought... I never thought..." Trembling, Colin sat on the trunk next to Mary's. He was too upset to continue, his heart lodged firmly in his mouth to gag him.  
  
"The ground might be there, Colin, but it will never give you anything if you ignore it."  
  
"The garden lived through all those years my father neglected it," he replied petulantly. He had heard Mary talking; he hadn't yet listened.  
  
Mary sighed. "It survived. Surviving is different from living. What did the garden give anyone until we made it alive again? If it existed, but if it wasn't truly alive to anyone, it might as well have been dead."  
  
"That it existed was enough for me. Clearing out all the thistle in the world wouldn't have meant anything if the roses weren't underneath."  
  
"I'm tired of thistle, Colin. There is nothing else here anymore, just the sad, tired, crushing thistle."  
  
He looked sidelong at his cousin. "And me."  
  
"Yes, you," Mary shot back, "under it all, just where you want to be."  
  
"Where else should I be? Out here, to watch you leave me like he did, like she did? Shall I stare at your back until you've gone away too?"  
  
"You're the one who went away! I've been living with your ghost for months. I can't live with a ghost, with looking at you and thinking of the person who used to be here!" It was Mary's turn to quake. Suddenly, she felt like she had gained an immense amount of knowledge of her poor, late uncle. It was one thing to know what his reasons for traveling were, but it was quite another to feel them herself. Colin was distant, but Colin wasn't dead. Her aunt had been dead when her uncle suffered these feelings, this hopelessness, this fear. Though he had learned to bear with his memories, he also had to learn to accept they were all he would ever have. There were still memories ahead of Mary and Colin, if they only wanted them. And oh, how she wanted them.  
  
In silence, the cousins sat for many minutes. Each was sitting on a trunk next to the other, staring out the large windows at another gloomy English day. It was Colin who slid to the near side of his trunk, and it was Mary who reached across for his hand. Their fingers intertwined with an unfamiliar purpose. They weren't playing or pulling, only touching. If they were touching, then they were real, and no ghost could exist where the person still lived. On opposite sides of the thistle, they were both alive. 


End file.
